I. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to the fields of chemistry and materials science. More particularly, it concerns metal-organic frameworks, compositions thereof and methods use thereof, including for gas storage, gas separation, catalysis and sensing.
II. Description of Related Art
Microporous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been rapidly emerging as new type of porous materials for gas storage, separation, sensing and heterogeneous catalysis. The tunable pores and the immobilized functional sites within such microporous MOFs have enabled them to direct specific recognition of certain molecules, and thus for their highly selective guest sorption and separation. In fact, one of the most powerful CO2/CH4 separation materials has been realized in a rod-packing microporous MOF Mg-MOF-74 (Britt et al., 2009), exhibiting extremely high selectivity. Although thousands of MOFs have been synthesized and structurally characterized over the past two decades, the ones with open metal sites are still relatively few (Chen et al., 2010; Dinca and Long, 2008), this is mainly because such open metal sites are typically very reactive and tend to bind the atoms from the neighboring ligands to form the condensed structures. Also, few MOFs have been shown to be useful for selective sorption, separation and/or sensing of guest molecules. Accordingly, identifying and developing materials and compositions that exhibit one or more of these useful properties is desirable.